What is Square?

Square is a point-of-sale (POS) application designed to provide businesses with a reliable and fast POS system. It enables you to take payments using your iOS or Android devices and can be implemented on the counter or on-the-go. The system comes with a free downloadable software plus a Square magstripe reader, allowing payments via debit and credit cards. It also comes with real-time sales and inventory tracker, as well as item management platform.

The easy to set up and simple to use POS is built to help get your staff up and running quickly. It lets you drag and drop items and categories, customize your items grid, and bring popular items front and center. With the system, customers can choose between digital (email or text message) and printed receipts. Its open tickets and split tender feature keep tabs open to let your customers pay when it’s convenient as well as split a tab by cards or take payments multiple ways.

Square gives you the ability to manage inventory such as changing item details like price, name, or quantity in real time. Likewise, it allows you to manage employee access to data with employee passcodes and keep an eye out on who sold and refunded what. Furthermore, Square’s POS system lets your employees clock in and out right at your point of sale. Every transaction is linked to an employee, thereby speeding up reconciling tips and commissions.

You can handle multiple locations from one account, letting you edit your menu, employee timecards, and prices for different locations from anywhere, all through your Square Dashboard. You get reporting functions that can filter reports by employee, location, and POS device, and generate revenue-per-labor-hour reports so that you can see your business’ financial performance.

Square is transaction-based, meaning you will be charged a certain percentage for every tap, dip, or swipe (representing your customer’s payment via credit card or mobile device) in your POS device (tablet or smartphone with Square magstripe reader or POS terminal with Square contactless reader).

Overview of Square Benefits

Simple and Powerful

Download the free app and easily install it in your device. Its drag and drop functionality provides ease of operation in organizing and moving items, products, and categories. The ticket management feature can keep tickets open to let you create, save, and add to orders with a touch. The ease of use of the software ensures that users instantly implement it right off the bat and immediately reap the benefits.

Square can generate feedback via intelligent reports and valuable analytics, giving you insights on your operations and help you come up with better business decisions. You get to run your business in real time and keep tab on your sales, customers, and more.

Manage Inventory Anywhere

Simply sign in to your free Square Dashboard from any computer and manage your inventory from anywhere. You can download reports on current inventory, update inventory quantities in bulk, receive daily stock alert email, and quickly import thousands of products with CSV spreadsheets.

Easy Email Marketing

Square can send automated email campaigns for you to help you send more targeted messages at the right time. You can set up welcome emails, birthday offers, and more, to build better customer relationships. The system lets you create new customer profiles at the point of sale to build your directory, and provides customizable email templates and a distribution list that lets you go from idea to sending email campaigns in minutes.

Extensive Integration

Square POS can extend its functionality by seamlessly integrating with dozens of apps for accounting and tax, ecommerce, other POS systems, inventory, invoices, employee management, booking and scheduling, among others. In addition, you can create your own custom apps and solutions for your business with the Square Connect API.

24/7 Support Center

You can contact Square by phone or email for any queries and issues or you can visit its support center which is open round the clock where you can find tons of POS tips, FAQs, articles, guides and videos. There is also a seller community where you can collaborate and learn from your fellow sellers.

Since each enterprise has unique business needs, it is prudent for them to abstain from seeking a one-size-fits-all faultless software system. Needless to say, it would be futile to try to find such an app even among market-leading software solutions. The intelligent thing to do would be to list the various essential aspects that need consideration such as required features, finances, skill levels of workers, company size etc. Then, you should do your homework thoroughly. Read some Square reviews and investigate each of the other apps in your shortlist in detail. Such exhaustive homework can ensure you reject ill-fitting applications and select the system that offers all the features you require for business success.

How Much Does Square Cost?

Square provides for free its POS app and Reader for Magstripe which plugs into your iOS and Android devices. It charges you 2.75% of the amount of payment of your customer per swipe for Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express. You can also opt to buy for $49 the Reader for Contactless and Chip, which also applies the same charge for every insert/dip of major credit cards or tap of smartphone (mobile payment) of your customer.

If you need more advanced tools, you can upgrade anytime to the Square for Retail plan that offers a monthly subscription. Pricing starts at $60/location per month and 2.5% charge plus $.10 per tap, dip, or swipe.

User Satisfaction

We realize that when you make a decision to buy POS Software it’s important not only to see how experts evaluate it in their reviews, but also to find out if the real people and companies that buy it are actually satisfied with the product. That’s why we’ve created our behavior-based Customer Satisfaction Algorithm™ that gathers customer reviews, comments and Square reviews across a wide range of social media sites. The data is then presented in an easy to digest form showing how many people had positive and negative experience with Square. With that information at hand you should be equipped to make an informed buying decision that you won’t regret.

What are Square pricing details?

Square provides for free its POS app and Reader for Magstripe which plugs into your iOS and Android devices. It charges you 2.75% of the amount of payment of your customer per swipe for Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express. You can also opt to buy for $49 the Reader for Contactless and Chip, which also applies the same charge for every insert/dip of major credit cards or tap of smartphone (mobile payment) of your customer.

If you need more advanced tools, you can upgrade anytime to the Square for Retail plan that offers a monthly subscription. Pricing starts at $60/location per month and 2.5% charge plus $.10 per tap, dip, or swipe.

What integrations are available for Square?

Square integrates with the following business systems and applications:

Vend

TouchBistro

SuitePOS

Aireus

Franpos

Lavu

Weebly

Wix

WooCommerce

BigCommerce

GoCentral

Square for Magento

Ecwid

ShipStation

3dcart

Drupal Commerce

Zen Cart

OpenCart

Unbound Commerce

Mercato

Zoho Books

Commerce Sync

Tax Jar

SHOGO

Enterpryze

Kashoo Accounting

ONE UP

Xero

Intuit QuickBooks Online

Sage Live

Hurdlr

Davo Sales Tax

LumaTax

Bench

Shopventory

Stitch Labs

MarketMan

DEAR Systems

DigitalPour

Sku IQ

Chargify

Tave

Breezeworks

Worksmith

Jobber

Hiveage

17hats

Dubsado

invoiceBerry

Fresh KDS

PeachWorks

SimpleOrder

BentoBox

Homebase

When I Work Deputy

TSheets

Humanity

ZipRecruiter

7Shifts

IFTTT

SumAll

Control

Dor

SimpleTix

Brushfire

TicketSocket

Starboard Suite

Cognito Forms

Jotform

Checkfront

Schedulicity

Acuity Scheduling

Wix Bookings

Booxi

eHealth

User reviews

User reviews in total: 13

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The most favorable review

Brett

1 month ago

Pros: Thanks to this tool, I'm capable of running a full-time travelling company. The mobile app isn't just great for catering to credit card payment, but I'm also capable of issuing e-receipts for both checks and cash. I'm able to log all of my sales in one medium.

Cons: I had a hard time minimizing fees when charging directly to a card. It would be better to have transparency with customers and showing them the kind of fees I'll be charging. At the same time, I have no intention of including a convenience fee as an "item" within the shop I run.

The least favorable review

Alexandra

6 months ago

Pros: This is easy to use tool and it is extremely simple to set up. It has free website with designing functions. It offers free reader, linking across multiple devices and inventory capability. It allows you to do coupons on the ship and to set shippong costs.

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